As Google Glass fades to distant memory, yet another alliterative wearable is trying to turn our faces into cameras. Why? Even Google — a company that we trust to develop self-driving cars and deliver burritos by drones — was heavily maligned for daring to add a camera to our glasses. The criticism was unrelenting: the glasses were expensive, they looked ridiculous, and they could be used to covertly take video of others without their knowledge. In some ways, Snapchat’s Spectacles address those concerns. They’ll retail for roughly one-tenth of what early adopters had to shell out for Google Glass, and the Spectacles camera has lights to indicate when it’s filming. How fashionable they are remains to be seen.

How is innovation consulting different from other kinds of consulting? In this guest post written for a-connect, our Managing Director Steve Wunker points out what makes innovation consulting distinctive, how the field has changed in the past decade, and what major trends will impact it in the future.

If you ask them, customers have a lot of needs—they want bigger, faster, more efficient, more variety. Most companies chase after this laundry list of to-do’s, churning out solutions that are increasingly elaborate and feature-laden. Sometimes they end up with a bullet train; other times, you get green-colored ketchup.

On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve seen companies direct their innovation efforts towards finding radical ways to do less—which correspondingly allows them charge less to their customers. These businesses are veterans at making tough trade-offs; they relish in ruthlessly and imaginatively funneling down to the bare bones of what their customers need. There are many ways to go about this cost-cutting, but the end result is almost always a transformative approach to the industry. We call this Costovation.

An example of this down-market innovation is Omenahotelli, a Scandinavian chain of budget hotels where just two things are guaranteed: a cheap rate and a central location. Anything else—like a lobby, receptionist, or even housekeeping services—is not part of the deal. Guests receive passcodes to unlock the front door and then self-service their way through their stay in highly-standardized rooms. Omenahotelli runs on a simple concept—price and location above all—and is as innovative as it is lean. It’s perfectly suited for budget travelers exploring an expensive part of the world.​Here are two key lessons about innovation that we’ve gathered from businesses that excel at Costovation.

Lesson #1: Innovation doesn’t have to be about more. We live in a world of ever-expanding phone display screens and 1000 flavor soda fountains, but catering to our ever-evolving whims comes at the expense of simplicity in the back-end supply chain. In contrast, one technique for Costovation involves rallying around the single most pressing customer need. It’s the opportunity to do just one or a handful of things very well.